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Most of our social nature is like that of other primates - we're mostly out for ourselves.

Jonathan Haidt

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Jonathan Haidt
Age: 61
Born: 1963
Born: October 19
Psychologist
University Teacher
Writer
New York City
New York
Jonathan David Haidt
Nature
Like
Primates
Mostly
Social

More quotes by Jonathan Haidt

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I got interested in the American culture war back in 2004, and it's one of the only growth stocks I've ever invested in.
Jonathan Haidt
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Morality binds people into groups. It gives us tribalism, it gives us genocide, war, and politics. But it also gives us heroism, altruism, and sainthood.
Jonathan Haidt
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In college, I was dead set on being a philosophy major, because I wanted to figure out the meaning of life. Four years later I realized philosophy had really nothing to say about the meaning of life, and psychology and literature are really where it's at.
Jonathan Haidt
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Liberals are my friends, my colleagues, my social world.
Jonathan Haidt
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When you hear someone criticize a policy on the other side, thats fine. But when you start hearing motive-mongering and demonization, stand up to it just as you would if it were something that was racist or sexist. If we avoid the demonization, disagreements can be positive.
Jonathan Haidt
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The social intuitionist model offers an explanation of why moral and political arguments are so frustrating: because moral reasons are the tail wagged by the intuitive dog. A dog’s tail wags to communicate. You can’t make a dog happy by forcibly wagging its tail. And you can’t change people’s minds by utterly refuting their arguments.
Jonathan Haidt
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Legalizing homosexuality is not the first step on a slippery slope to legalizing everything.
Jonathan Haidt
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By temperament and disposition and emotions, I'm a liberal but in my beliefs about what's best for the country, I'm a centrist.
Jonathan Haidt
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The extreme self-sacrifice characteristic of group-selected species such as ants and bees can often be found among soldiers.
Jonathan Haidt
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Happiness doesn't come from getting what you want. It doesn't come from within, either. Happiness comes from *between*--from finding the right relationship between yourself and others, between yourself and your work, and between yourself and something larger than yourself.
Jonathan Haidt
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Many species reciprocate, but only humans gossip, and much of what we gossip about is the vale of other people as partners for reciprocal relationships.
Jonathan Haidt
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Sacredness binds people together, and then blinds them to the arbitrariness of the practice.
Jonathan Haidt
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In accounts of men in battle, there is an incredible adrenaline rush from group-versus-group conflict. The fervor and passion of partisans is clearly rewarding and if it's rewarding, it involves dopamine and if it involves dopamine, then it is potentially addictive.
Jonathan Haidt
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Individuals who could not form cooperative alliances, on average, died sooner and left fewer children. And so we are the descendants of the successful cooperators.
Jonathan Haidt
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Liberals and conservatives are opponents in the most literal sense, each using the myth of pure evil to demonize the other side and unite there own.
Jonathan Haidt
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We can tolerate great diversity in our aesthetic beliefs, but we can't tolerate much diversity in our moral beliefs.
Jonathan Haidt
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Dividing into teams doesn't necessarily mean denigrating others. Studies of groupishness have generally found that groups increase in-group love far more than they increase out-group hostility.
Jonathan Haidt
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If you are in passionate love and want to celebrate your passion, read poetry. If your ardor has calmed and you want to understand your evolving relationship, read psychology. But if you have just ended a relationship and would like to believe you are better off without love, read philosophy.
Jonathan Haidt
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People can believe pretty much whatever they want to believe about moral and political issues, as long as some other people near them believe it, so you have to focus on indirect methods to change what people want to believe.
Jonathan Haidt
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The world doesn't usually affect us directly. It's what we do with it. It's the filters that we put on it. That's the foundation of certainly most pop-psychology, and of a lot of psychotherapy, cognitive therapy. So that, I think, is the greatest truth.
Jonathan Haidt